Halliburton Posts Loss on Asbestos Charge

[seemslikeadream]

Tue Oct 26, 2004 08:38 AM ET

By Matt Daily
HOUSTON (Reuters) - Halliburton Co. (HAL.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , the world's No. 2 oil field services company, on Tuesday fell to a quarterly loss as $230 million in charges to fund its asbestos settlement outweighed gains in its energy business.

The Houston-based company, formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, said its net loss in the third quarter totaled $44 million, or 9 cents per share, compared with year-earlier net income of $58 million, or 13 cents per share.

The company's KBR engineering and construction unit, which has been surrounded in controversy for its work with the U.S. military in Iraq where it its the largest private contractor, posted a $50 million operating loss in the quarter versus a $49 million profit in the same period a year ago.

That loss was largely due to $70 million in project losses, as well as $18 million in costs to restructure the unit as part of a process that could see Halliburton sell or spin off the business

more
http://olympics.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=businessNews&storyID=6612933

OCTOBER 26, 2004
NEWS ANALYSIS
By Mike France

What Cheney Did at Halliburton
An in-depth look at his tenure there finds a decidedly mixed record. One major blunder: Acquiring an asbestos albatross with Dresser

Halliburton (HAL ) has the misfortune of being one of those rare companies that becomes a Presidential campaign issue. Citing a wide array of alleged misdeeds -- including accounting fraud, bribery, bilking the government, tax evasion, and trading with rogue nations -- Democrats are suggesting that Vice-President Dick Cheney, who was chief executive of the Houston-based oil-services and construction giant from 1995 to 2000, is unsuited to be reelected Vice-President and, more broadly, that Republicans are indifferent to corporate misbehavior. Advertisement


Republicans, unsurprisingly, dismiss the Halliburton-bashing as mere demagoguery. "The reason they keep mentioning Halliburton is because they're trying to throw up a smokescreen," Cheney declared during the Oct. 5 Vice-Presidential debate. "They know the charges are false."

The back-and-forth has confused voters and done little to clarify the relevant issues: What kind of a company is Halliburton? How much did Cheney know about the alleged legal and ethical abuses during his tenure? And how did he do as a CEO, anyway? Would the board have booted him if he had remained in his job? The campaign has turned these from dead historical questions into partisan political issues deserving of closer scrutiny.

STICKY PROBLEMS. With multiple investigations still under way, a continuous stream of new information about Halliburton's past keeps flowing -- but it's still impossible to provide conclusive answers to these questions. At this point, though, nothing suggests that the company deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the present-day icons of corporate malfeasance. Closer analogies would probably be to Boeing (BA ) or Merrill Lynch (MER ) -- both of which, like Halliburton, have found their way into a wide range of sticky problems, across diverse business units, over a long period of time.

more
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/oct2004/nf20041026_2453_db038.htm

[KlatooBNikto]

1. Who is doing the accounting?Andersen or its offshoot?

[Ivote]

2. With all the no bid contracts they received

They still couldn't make a profit.
Werent they supposed to go belly up before the war?:think:

[LeftHander]

3. HAH! Imagine if there was no Iraq war.....

What does one think Halliburton's fortunes would look like?

This shows proof of what I have posted before. Cheney's motivation as VP was to make SURE a long expensive war started with HAL being a recipient of lucrative open bid contracts.

The reason he did this was because Cheney screwed up as CEO of Halliburton in 1999 by aquiring Dresser Industries. Dresser was strapped with a quagmire of asbestos law suits partly because of Harbison-Walker.

Harbison-Walker (Walker - as in "W") and Dresser have long been the fortune maker for the Bush family.

Prescott Bush took Dresser public in the 20's and His son, George HW Bush was an executive in Dresser in the 60's.

Cheney the clever fiend he is saw an opporunity to protect all his cronies in the military and Halliburton by becoming VP with GW. The fix was in an the operation to save the Halliburton was on.

It was all so elegent. Dick Cheney is not working for the American people. He is VP in name only. He is still holding to Halliburton make no mistake about that.